Karen McVeigh: Occupy movement plans spring offensive as momentum stalls

Occupy movement plans spring offensive as momentum stalls: After eight weeks of dramatic growth, organisers consider how to sustain the protest movement through winter
by Karen McVeigh
The Guardian (United Kingdom)

Anyone who has walked through Zuccotti Park in recent days will be left in little doubt about the intention of Occupy Wall Street protesters to push on through the winter. Huge military-style canvas tents designed to withstand plunging temperatures have sprung up among dozens of smaller, two and three-person pods. One, marked with a red cross, offers flu shots, while another offers a safe space for women.

But as the diehards in New York and other encampments across the US prepare to dig in, organisers are facing their next big challenge: what next?

In a tacit admission that the protests will be difficult to sustain over the winter, organisers are now focusing their efforts on planning a "spring offensive" with fresh targets, they told the Guardian in a series of interviews this week.

Details of the campaign will be unveiled later this month, according to the activists who say they will spend the winter consolidating their position, broadening their support base and refining communication between Occupy grounds nationwide, using online tools being developed by their IT team.

Keeping the protests alive at all through the cold months is becoming a challenge for a movement flushed with the dramatic success of its first eight weeks.

The Guardian has learned that Adbusters, the Canadian activist group which helped spark the movement, is even considering calling on occupiers to declare "victory" for phase one and go home for the winter – clear recognition that numbers are likely to dwindle anyway and make it increasingly difficult for the protests to maintain momentum and generate headlines.

In its first few weeks, the grassroots protest spread from New York to hundreds of towns and cities globally. It altered political discourse, forced debate away from the deficit towards inequality and, via a series of high-profile actions, marches and – most dramatically – clashes with police, shot up the news agenda worldwide.

But now there are signs that public interest is tailing off, with resources such as Factiva and Google Trends appearing to show a drop in searches for "Occupy Wall Street" over recent weeks. Media coverage, too, is dwindling.

At Zuccotti Park, activists acknowledge that there has been a lull. But they say that, as a measure of the movement's success, it is irrelevant.

Activist Justin Wedes, who beckoned me to follow him to a meeting as we talked, said: "If the mainstream media has shifted their focus off Occupy Wall Street it doesn't mean we are not growing as a movement. We are growing every day and new occupations are cropping up."

As we moved from the east side of the encampment to the west, Wedes greeted fellow activists, exchanging high-fives with some and patting others on the shoulder.

He said: "We never intended to rely on the mainstream media to put out our message. In two months we have established hundreds of media centres, 24/7 live streaming, and traditional print media in the form of Occupy Wall Street Journal. People are becoming citizen journalists. In the reporting of the movement, we are making the mainstream media irrelevant right now."

He said that they plan now to communicate better internally and that, inside a nearby media tent, people were working on online tools to facilitate general assemblies between Occupy encampments in separate locations.

Activists in the leaderless movement readily admit that ensuring consensus in a non-hierarchical has its challenges. But they are adamant that the fledgling movement is sustainable.

"The tactic of physical occupation worked very well at the beginning," said another activist, Jonathan Smucker. "It was a powerful symbol of defiance against some of the most powerful people in the world who are widely recognised as being culpable for the economic situation we are in. As a way of achieving a goal or being in a better position to achieve a goal, it has been enormously successful. Overnight and for the last month, we have changed the narrative around the economy and society. But we risk being defined by that one tactic as opposed to the values that are resonating with people. It's not an easy thing to navigate.

"We can't keep replicating the same tactic and expect the same level of success. The challenge is, what do you do? How do you find another way to strike that chord with more people?"

Smucker believes that the shift in debate is a backdrop which enables political change. He cites the example of Ohio, where this week a Republican-backed law curbing collective bargaining rights was voted out by a margin of almost two to one, after a union campaign.

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